"Well, Basil," said JB Priestley to his director as the curtain came down on his latest production, "that's another one you've ruined."

It was 1946. Priestley's clarion call to the returning troops had been presented to audiences in the West End as a cosily-reassuring Edwardian drawing-room drama.

Worse yet, Basil Dean's cue script had been printed up as the standard text, to be handed down to generations of touring actors and amateur theatricals who would come to believe that this was the way its author intended it.

It is, therefore, with some trepidation that Julian Webber prepares to bring a violently re-worked version of An Inspector Calls to JB's home town.

"Do you think we'll have the Priestley Appreciation Society demonstrating outside the Alhambra?" he wonders.

The show of which he now finds himself in charge has been a famous success in the West End and even on Broadway, running since 1988 and attracting plaudits from critics who had previously consigned Priestley to the theatrical history books alongside Ben Travers and his farces.

The play's revival restored what its 1988 director Stephen Daldry believed to be Priestley's original vision: a passionate call to the new order to break down the old, and specifically to remove Winston Churchill from power.

Priestley used his fascination with the passage of time to place his mysterious Inspector Goole in the company of a well-to-do family from an earlier period. Officially, the play was set at the end of World War One, but the inspector was clearly a man out of his time.

Daldry's take on the play was to build an elaborate and expressionist set which portrayed both periods at the same time, and to make the actors work at such a pitch as to generate real anger. "I will stick my neck out," says Webber, "and say that Priestley would have profoundly enjoyed this production - and he does seem to have been a man not used to withholding his opinions.

"I'll go to bat against anyone who has been prejudiced by the way the play has come down to us and who believes it is somehow alien to Priestley."

He acknowledges, though, that anyone - and this must include every theatre-goer in Bradford - who has seen a "conventional" production of An Inspector Calls, will be aghast.

"It's hugely different," he says. "If you're used to seeing the show done in a conventional, drawing room setting, you can't help but be quite shocked for the first five minutes. You'll think, what on earth has this got to do with the play I know?

"But the ideas in the set, for all their sophistication and sheer physical cleverness, serve to illuminate the play, rather than do a little dance on top of it - and Priestley's themes come through loud and excitingly clear."

The author's obsession with time is at the heart of the new production, says Webber.

"Priestley believed that all time was coincidental and that you could slip easily between different eras - and that's what the production does. It allows these different times to co-exist in such a way as to allow the inspector in his demob suit to confront someone in an Edwardian dinner jacket.

"It puts Priestley's political and philosophical ideas into very strong relief."

The author's disagreement with Basil Dean back in 1946 points, says Webber, to his disappointment with staging the play entirely within the confines of a drawing room.

"Priestley was fascinated with non-naturalistic ways of telling a story in the theatre and he believed quite strongly that his themes would benefit immensely from being placed in a more symbolic setting than his original director did."

Webber was living and working in New York when he first saw the revival he would later direct. "When I grew up, Priestley was considered fuddy-duddy and old fashioned. If you were hip, you didn't do Priestley, did you? He was a playwright for your mum and dad.

"But this production reinvented him. It caused everyone to start looking at Priestley again, and within a short time, there were five or six other plays of his being produced again. People started to re-examine the work of someone they had dismissed for 20 years."

The then-prevalent Thatcher culture had something do to with it, he adds. "Priestley would love to have had Inspector put on as a simple response to the forceful Thatcherite argument that 'society' no longer exists and that we should go back to being self-reliant. That's at the heart of the play's message."

Mark McGann will play the Inspector in the touring version, tickets for which have just gone on sale.

"Anyone expecting a polite civilised, well-mannered drama is in for an awful shock," says Webber.

"In Bradford of all places, I'm fairly sure it will cause a stir."

l An Inspector Calls is at the Alhambra, Bradford, from November 16-20. Tickets are now bookable on 01274 752000.

David Behrens

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